Standing in the Water

on losing our hope

Several years ago, in the midst of one of the darkest seasons of my life, I experienced what I can only describe as a moment of heaven on earth.

I was sitting on my back porch. We had recently lost our daughter after over a year of beautiful and traumatic life. Returning to being a “normal” person — working, fathering, husbanding, just getting going for the day — felt hard and slow and impossible. I felt so angry, scared, and tired. I was losing hope.

There’s something powerful about the moment when hope is lost. That is the moment when in place of our lost hope — a hope we may have been clinging to for years — a new hope can arrive. This new hope has a different quality to it. It can feel foreign, not from us. It has a permanence to it. It exists and persists outside of us. Outside of our willingness or ability to “hold on to hope.” This hope holds on to us.

As I sat on my back porch, losing my hope, I noticed the light. It was streaming through the windows in a way I’d never noticed in over a decade of living in that house. I noticed the curtains dancing as the breeze blew through. The breeze felt cool against my skin. I heard our kids playing and laughing in the house. It was all so bright, and beautiful. And in this moment — in the midst of this horribly dark, hopeless season — I felt the words leave my lips, “this is the best moment of my life.”

How?

How can something wonderful just happen when everything else is so dark?

This is how: it was always happening.

It’s happening now.

We just miss it — because we’re preoccupied with our hope.

Our hope. It’s different than hope itself. Our hope is made by us. It’s sustained by us. When we stop, we lose it.

“I hope I’ll get that job.” “I hope I’ll make that team.” “I hope this relationship works out.” “I hope I live to 100.” “I hope the world goes this way or that way.”

Having hope is work. Hard work. Keeping it is even harder.

But sometimes things just get too dark. And we just get too tired. And we just. Can’t. Hold. On. Anymore. And we lose our hope.

And then it happens. The moment comes, when we lose our hope... and life doesn’t stop.

It is in this moment — this infinitesimally tiny sliver of unwanted time and space — when we finally feel what it’s like to not carry everything. We begin to realize we are being carried. And, contrary to what felt true before, the world has not ended, and we’re still here.

This is the moment when heaven shines through. But not in the way we expected — not through happenings, or timelines, or our ability to believe or live any certain way... it comes when we stop trying to conjure it, and we are finally able to notice it.

We’ve been busy hoping and praying for rain;
We’ve been standing in the water the whole time.

Heaven is not in the sky. It is not something we have to work to get to. It wells up from the earth. From within us.

Heaven is not in the future. It’s not something we have to wait for. Heaven exists in the infinitely deep point of time we call the present.

Even in our darkest seasons — beneath the layers of loss, tragedy, trauma, hate, poverty, sickness, sadness, and fear that exist in our world — heaven is here.

It only takes a moment to notice, and when we do, we will never forget.